“Just another game,” Harry Brook declared in an interview with Wisden Cricket Monthly ahead of this Ashes series. “The same ball coming down at me. Just another human bowling a little round leather thing at another human. And I’ve got to hit it with a bit of wood. That’s it, really.”
We can assume that Nasser Hussain’s job at Sky Sports is probably safe for the time being. But in another sense it was a quote that cut to the heart of what has made Brook one of the world’s most devastating players. Playing for England has always come with a certain quantum of baggage attached: historical, cultural, judgmental. But more than any of his current teammates, Brook has the ability to strip away context, to bat without prejudice, to boil the game down its simplest chemical form. That’s not Mitchell Starc; it’s a moving meat spindle covered in white cloth and sun cream. That’s not a scoreboard; it’s a random array of coloured electronic shapes. And this isn’t the most eagerly anticipated Ashes series since 2005, because in 2005 you were six years old and probably sitting on a swing.
Which is not to say he doesn’t care. In fact he used to care too much: on one under-19 tour of India he returned to the dressing room after a dismissal, punched a table in anger and broke his hand. But you get the feeling cricket will not eat Brook in the way it eats so many of its young. He was never an obsessive watcher of the game growing up. Even now, at the crease, you can glimpse that clarity of thought before he has even hit a ball. There are few twiddles and fiddles as he takes strike, no discernible tics. The back-and-across trigger movement did not emerge until his 20s. Perhaps when you are as gifted as Brook at seeing and hitting a cricket ball, everything else is window dressing.
At times over recent months, cricket has been trying its hardest to chip away at that placid facade. After being signed by Sunrisers Hyderabad for £1.3m he flew out to the Indian Premier League, pretty much the last place you want to be if you crave the simple life. He was shocked by the poverty he saw on the streets. He was baffled by the sight of people having curry for breakfast. He began with three low scores and would spend his nights lying alone in his luxury hotel bed, doomscrolling through the torrents of scorn and criticism on his phone. When he struck a brilliant unbeaten hundred against Kolkata in his fourth game, he rounded on his critics, saying: “I’m glad I could shut them up.” He made 61 runs in his last seven innings. They did not shut up. Brook eventually quit social media for a time.
Then came the Ashes, and as England slipped to a 2-0 deficit Brook’s natural talent seemed to run up against the urge to entertain and dominate. There were two silly dismissals by Nathan Lyon at Edgbaston. A chaotic innings at Lord’s that ended when he tried to slap a bouncer over cover. A promotion to No 3 at Headingley was shelved after one innings. All of a sudden Brook was all context, all baggage: to his critics the profligate figurehead of a debauched cricketing death cult.
What was largely missed amid the outbreak of Brook-burning was that he had never been purely a hitter. His 186 at Wellington was a masterclass in building and pacing an innings, paying due respect to the frontline seamers while collaring the more modest offerings of Daryl Mitchell and Michael Bracewell. And in the nerve-shredding Headingley run chase Brook finally hit his sweet spot: trusting his defence as well as his attack, cutting loose while still somehow remaining in control.
Here, coming in with 336 already on the board, he simply carried on in the same vein: keeping out the good balls and preying on the loose ones, not batting for the gallery, not batting in the Ashes, but just batting. In a way this has been the key to England’s fightback: the art of scoring quickly without undue risk. The opening session on Friday produced 122 runs at five an over and still felt somehow sedate, composed, even a little serene. He was eventually caught on the rope for 61, a little short of his 64 average.
By any measure this has been a remarkable start: the third-fastest Englishman to 1,000 Test runs, and at almost a run a ball. There is talk of a lucrative multi-year England contract in the next round of deals, an unprecedented commitment to a supreme 24-year-old talent who simply wants to play international cricket as long as he can. And for all the drama of this Ashes series there has been a strangely feverish quality to it too: a sense of endings and decay, the gnawing thought that with Test cricket being slowly eaten away, we may never have it this good again. Relax: as long as Harry Brook is hitting a little round leather thing with a bit of wood, it’s going to be fine.
